ning our contract for board, and
for having altogether treated him as one of the uninspired. Let me do
him the tardy justice to say that he keeps, after the Stella d'Oro at
Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, and that his comedy was really very
sprightly. It is no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we
know, and a poet who does it ought to have a double acclaim.

Nobody who cares to travel with decency and comfort can take the
second-class cars on the road between Naples and Rome, though these
are perfectly good everywhere else in Italy. The Papal city makes her
influence felt for shabbiness and uncleanliness wherever she can, and
her management seems to prevail on this railway. A glance into
the second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class,--which in
themselves were bad,--and we took our places almost contentedly.

The road passed through the wildest country we had seen in Italy; and
presently a rain began to fall and made it drearier than ever. The
land was much grown up with thickets of hazel, and was here and there
sparsely wooded with oaks. Under these, hogs were feeding upon the
acorns, and the wet swine-herds were steaming over fires built at their
roots. In some places the forest was quite dense; in other places it
fell entirely away, and left the rocky hill-sides bare, and solitary
but for the sheep that nibbled at the scanty grass, and the shepherds
that leaned upon their crooks and motionlessly stared at us as we
rushed by. As we drew near Rome, the scenery grew lonelier yet; the
land rose into desolate, sterile, stony heights, without a patch of
verdure on their nakedness, and at last abruptly dropped into the
gloomy expanse of the Campagna.

The towns along the route had little to interest us in their looks,
though at San Germano we caught a glimpse of the famous old convent of
Monte-Cassino, perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of
the rock on which it was built. Fancy now loves to climb that steep
acclivity, and wander through the many-volumed library of the ancient
Benedictine retreat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and
certainly less expensive than actual ascent and acquaintance with
the monastery would have been. Two Croatian priests, who shared our
compartment of the railway carriage, first drew our notice to the
place, and were enthusiastic about it for many miles after it was
out of sight. What gentle and pleasant men they were, and how hard it
seemed that they